Saturday, July 9, 2016

Psalm 39 assures us that even in the darkest places, the infinite love of God is there for us and for all- no exceptions.

Gregory Boyle SJ writes : "There is a longing in us all to be God-enthralled. So enthralled that to those hunkered down in their disgrace, in the shadow of death, we become transparent messengers of God's own tender mercy. We want to be seized by that same tenderness, we want to bear the largeness of God." (Tattoos on the Heart, p. 45)

Friday, July 8, 2016

Let us pray for the police in Dallas who died in gun violence let us pray for people of color who die from violence in police custody. As we listen to Susan Boyle sing, "make me a channel of your peace", may this be our prayer. Bridget Mary Meehan ARCWP

Wednesday, July 6, 2016

Greg Boyle focuses on the power of kinship. His book challenges us to "recognize our own wounds in the broken lives and daunting struggles of the men and women in these parables. " Read Tattoos on the Heart and be inspired! Bridget Mary Meehan ARCWP, www.arcwp.org

Tuesday, July 5, 2016

Scripture scholars agree that Jesus
actually spoke today's parable of the Good Samaritan,
or something very much like it.
They call the parable itself “a classic example
of the provocative public speech of Jesus the preacher.”
But they also say that Luke
created the dialogue around the parable,
reasoning that the dialogue asks two questions
that are different from the teaching of the parable itself.
Those two questions
are what I'm used to hearing about this passage:
“Who is my neighbor?” and “Which one acted like a neighbor?”
But the parable itself leads us to ask this question:
“From what quarter can I expect help
when I have been robbed, beaten, and left for dead?”
If I'm the one in need of help,
who do I think will step up and be a neighbor to me?
_________________________________________
Phyllis is one.
Whenever I have to go out of town overnight,
she tends my chickens and keeps watch on the house.
Then there's Carrie and her family, across the street from me.
They've learned how to herd chickens
from those times the mail carrier or meter reader
has left the gate open.
Down at Claver House George and John and Tina and Shirley
get worried and phone me if I don't show up for breakfast.
And you, the members of our Holy Spirit Catholic Community,
tend me every time you see me struggling—
like when I was hobbling around on crutches last spring.
I am surrounded by Good Samaritans,
people who help me instinctively
because they have formed themselves
into compassionate human beings.
So there are people around me who I expect will help me.
But who would I not expect help from?
_________________________________________
Jesus' audience for this parable would have thought
that the beat-up and bleeding man in the ditch was a Jew.
They would have expected the priest and the Levite to help him.
But they didn't.
They would not have expected the hated Samaritan to help him.
But he did.
And he went way beyond that,
reaching out with boundless compassion and resources
to bring help and healing.
_________________________________________
Would I expect a Muslim to help me? Or not?
A Mexican immigrant?
A politician?
A homeless person?
A bishop?
My answer will show what I think of other people.
It will lay bare my acceptance of some and my rejection of others.
_________________________________________
We all want to become the kind of person
who will be expected to be a neighbor to anyone in need.
The only way to do that
is to practice compassion in ordinary, everyday life.
When we decide to follow Jesus, it's a process.
We decide to reflect and pray and study and act
in ways that will form us into a person of virtue.
If we think people who are different from us—
in race or ethnicity or religion
or gender or political persuasion—
would not be expected to help us in a crisis,
that's a sign that we need to change.
_________________________________________
Toledo janitor Karen Loudermill, taking a break from work,
saw a young girl walking alone on the street
in the middle of the night.
Karen didn't hesitate to get involved.
She didn't worry about getting back to work on time.
She didn't wonder if the girl was on drugs, or mentally ill,
or dangerous in some way.
She didn't think about what could happen to her.
Karen walked over and started the conversation
that uncovered serious mistreatment
in the home where the girl had been kept a prisoner.
_________________________________________
D.C. government worker Larry Skutnik,
caught in a traffic jam on a bridge over the Potomac
as he headed home,
got out of his car
and saw that a plane had crashed into the river.
Larry watched as a helicopter rescued two of the three people
hanging on to the tail of the plane.
When he saw the third starting to go under,
he took off his shoes and jacket, dived into the freezing water,
and brought the woman to the shore.
Larry's comment: “I reacted instinctively, that's all.”
What made Karen and Larry take those heroic actions?
What made them risk danger to help a stranger?
What gave them that instinct for compassion?
_________________________________________
That kind of virtue comes from how they had learned to be
in the ordinary times,
not from extraordinary circumstances.
They are ordinary people
who learned compassion
to the point that they didn't even think about themselves
when they saw another human being in need.
The crisis didn't create their character.
It revealed it.
_________________________________________
Social psychologists who study bystander apathy
identify three things a person uses
to decide whether to do something in an emergency:
whether or not they feel the person is deserving of help;
whether they have competence to help;
and what relationship they have with the victim.
As Christians—and as Americans—
we say we believe that all people are equal
and therefore equally deserving of help.
We believe that everyone is a child of God, a brother or sister to us.
That means that we have the same relationship
with any and every victim.
And that means that we have a responsibility
to develop habits of compassion
that will cause us to act instinctively
to help whenever we can.
We can't hesitate because the person isn't like us,
or because we don't know who they are,
or because we aren't EMTs.
When Jesus says
that the law is summed up as love God and love neighbor,
it sounds easy…
but it's the journey of a lifetime.
Amen!

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"There is a cosmic Christ; There is a cosmic Mary; there is a
cosmic Self in every one of us. Cosmic in this context refers to the bigness of
our faith when it includes the entire universe in its embrace.We move from focusing only our own
salvation to a deep caring about all creation.

The sweet images of Mary, without earthiness or passion,
depict a broken, restricted and abridged archetype of the divine feminine.The Madonna most of us grew up with was
all about comfort, and she does, indeed, offer that in a nonstop way. But she
is also the challenger, the one who calls us to join her in her unceasing
battle for justice , to care with active compassion for the downtrodden. She
wants to bring us to the smelly, excluded, disenfranchised, marginalized
members of our society because that is where she is.

There is the image of Mary from Central America showing her
with dark skin under the title Madre de
los Desparecidos (Mother of the Disappeared). Mary is representing the
mothers of those who were kidnapped and killed. Mary is the archetype of help
before, during and after the injustices. Our challenge is to ask for more and
more from Mary, Protectress of the Helpless. This allows the archetype of
divine feminine to evolve more fully in our consciousness.

Thus, Mary is the champion, the fierce tigress for
justice.This is the oppositeof the unattaninable, remote Madonna in
traditional iconography. These images “keep her in her place” rather than
acknowledge that her place is everywhere: she is one of us and for the least of
us. This Mary does not support a privileged white ego. She is best pictured as
the black Madonna, the creatively erotic, earth Mother, who keeps her promise
to guide and protect our planet.

We see in Mary the importance of our calling to bring a
prophetic vision to the world. We practice reaching this imaginative vision
through a combination of contemplation and focus on world problems with an
apostolic intent. Prophetic imagination means trusting divine power in history
and envisioning more of it in the future.

Less devotion to Mary nowadays is not about more devotion to
Jesus: It is about less consciousness of the role of the feminine in the story
of our salvation. Paradoxically, one acknowledge the divine feminine, we find
Jesus more fully. This is because he represents wholeness; what we mean when we
say he is divine. There is a direct connection between who Mary is and what all
women are in their full empowerment.

All of our lives we have seen Mary pictured as a beautiful
woman. Her beauty is not meant to represent remoteness. It is symbolic of the
divine wholeness in all of us… a mirror of what we are called to be whole and
wholly devoted to a life of caring love… connected not to timid submissiveness,
but to strength. Mary does not appear to people to bring heaven to our hearts, but to expose the heaven within our hearts."

David Richo, in When
Mary Becomes Cosmic,pp. 3-8

Meditation: Contemplate

Today be aware of Mary as a spiritual presence who reveals "heaven within your heart."

Upper Room Inclusive Catholic Community Celebrates Liturgy of InterdependenceDennis McDonald and Deven Horne lead the Upper Room Inclusive Catholic Community in a liturgical celebration of interdependence.

Statement of Faith: Commitment to all of Creation:

All: Recognizing that the earth is a gift from our gracious God, and that we are called to cherish, nurture and provide loving stewardship of earth’s recourses, and recognizing that life itself is a gift, and a call to responsibility, joy and celebration, today I enter into a covenant with the Holy One, for my own sake, and for those I love, and for the well-being of the human family.

I commit myself to join with others in reshaping institutions in order to bring about a more just global society, in which each person has access to the resources needed for their physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual growth.

I commit myself to vote for and support those political candidates who demonstrate an authentic concern for the environment.

I commit myself to occupational accountability: I will seek to avoid the creation of products which cause harm to others. commit myself to personal renewal through prayer, meditation and study.

I commit myself to participation in a community of faith.

Amen. Let it be so!I affirm the health of my body, and commit myself to its proper nourishment and physical well-being.

I commit myself to personal renewal through prayer, meditation and study.

I commit myself to participation in a community of faith.

Amen. Let it be so!

A reading from Viriditas and Veritas: The Ecological Prophets Hildegard of Bingen andMiriam Therese MacGillis, OP by Matthew Fox

“Every cosmology represents God in its own particular way, as well as offering a globalizing, integrative, and sacramental understanding of the world,” writes Boff. For Hildegard of Bingen, twelfth century German Benedictine abbess, the universe is like an egg in the womb of God.

Hildegard can be seen as an ecological prophet both in her cosmology and in her assertion that there is a profound and life giving power of lush greenness immanent in all creation,

In the light of the rapid deterioration and degradation of the earth’s wild life, rivers, flora and fauna, Berry, Swimme and MacGillis as their spokesperson, posit that the ecological crisis is necessarily a crisisof cosmology. It is this crisis with its threats and challenges that has become the passion of Miriam Therese MacGillis. She writes: “Now, more than ever, as we move through the unprecedented dangers and opportunities unleashed in these early years of the 21st century, we’re deeply in need of a transforming vision…A vision that opens the future up to hope.”5 The new universe story provides that transforming vision.

As a so-called “green sister” MacGillis’ environmental concerns are those of many religious women, according to McFarland Taylor. Telling the story of a cosmology that will provide a meaningful sense of the nature of the universe, companion planting.

Hildegard calls it “greening love” that “hastens to the aid of all. With the passion of heavenly yearning, people who breathe this dew produce rich fruit.” Viriditas has a moral aspect reflected in the relationships of men and women:

The earth grants sprouting fecundity according to the nature of human beings, depending on the quality and direction of their lives and actions. Men and women are the light-green heart of the living fullness of nature. A direct connection exists between the heart of a person and all the elements of the cosmos. They effect together that which has been decided in human hearts (1998:72).

These are the inspired words of Matthew Fox.

A reading from Ancestral Grace by Diarmuid O’MurchuThe vision of the kingdom is postulated on a worldview of radical inclusiveness and egalitarianism. Nothing is excluded, particularly the surrounding creation from which we inherit the primary paradigms based on differences and distinctions. We’re challenged to reclaim what we share in common (particularly the one earth), rather than clinging on to what separates and divides us.

And it is not by accident that many of the parables relate to the land, its usufruct (the right of using and enjoying all the advantages and profits of the property of another without altering or damaging the substance), and the way landowners treat those who worked on the land. Here as in the Covenant of the Hebrew Scriptures, the land is a representative icon of the ever nourishing and sustaining God, with echoes of the key role also attributed to the Great Earth Mother Goddess.

By the making of the New Reign of God the heart and core of his mission, Jesus was not merely activating a renewal program for the Jewish religion, nor was he consciously trying to invent a new religion. No, his dream, as John’s Gospel illustrates, was to call humans to a radical realignment with the God at the heart of creation as a cosmic-planetary organism. It was an awakening call, ever old and ever to embrace afresh, in radical love, justice, and liberation. Beyond all human, social, and political ideologies, Jesus brought a dream of a new heaven and new earth. As a Christian people, we still have not caught up with that visionary cosmic Jesus.

These are the inspired words of Diarmuid O’Murchu

A reading from the Gospel according to Matthew"That is why I tell you not to worry about everyday life--whether you have enough food and drink, or enough clothes to wear. Isn't life more than food, and your body more than clothing? Mt 6:25These are the inspired words from the Gospel of Matthew